Journal

The landscape of the Lake District has many different characters – the region is so vast spanning from coast to high mountains.

This is NT Stowe in Buckinghamshire one of the best known 18th century English Landscape Gardens. This type of garden is vast and really only accessible to the very rich who often created them as a statement as much as just because they could.

I recently visited NT Stowe, Buckinghamshire, a huge ‘garden’ full of ‘garden’ buildings, statues, dams and bridges, created by Viscount Cobham from 1717 working with several landscape designers and architects

I love the way the shadows of this sculpture play across the stone paving when the lights come on in the evening. It’s a focal point, art installation, meeting point, lighting and way finder.

All around the UNESCO World Heritage Site of medieval Siena you see these wonderful iron horse tethers fixed into the walls of buildings at about 6′ high. There are 17 different designs across the city each advertising which ‘ward’ or ‘contrada’ they represent.

Eyecatchers are a great way to draw people around a garden and to show them where you’d like them to go – that there’s something else to see. Not many of us have the space that they have at Chatsworth to play with eyecatchers on this scale, but they work on any scale.